David Cameron can't bribe people into marriage

Monday 19 December 2011 11:34 BST

High risk: Jolie with Brad Pitt at the premiere of In the Land of Blood and Honey

It's liberal trendies such as David Cameron who really make my blood boil. Oh yes, he talks about being a "Christian society"; says we shouldn't be ashamed of it. Blethers on about "Judaeo-Christian values" (why are we funding faith schools for other religions, come to that?) and suchlike.

But does he practise what he preaches? Let's look in the Bible. Abraham had three wives. King David had upwards of eight. Would our whited sepulchre of a Prime Minister give Abraham or David a tax break to help with the nippers? Would he buffalo. No, he'd probably say, with a pious look on his plasticky pink face, that that idea of marriage is "out of date".

As such, he has no right climbing aboard his high horse when Nick Clegg says his own idea of what constitutes a family is "out of date". "Out of date" is a red herring. The question is, rather: is it the place of the state to be seeking to control through the disposition of tax money how people live their private lives? Most thinking conservatives would say no, it is not.

If Tories have any coherent position philosophically, it is as the party of personal freedom and personal responsibility, not the party of social engineering. They boast of having a larger vision of individual agency than the command-and-control Left: one that doesn't see human relationships as (in the vulgar Marxist position) inexorably determined by material relations. That is their moral and intellectual strength.

Likewise, we needn't argue back and forth about the statistics showing that on average nuclear families do better on indices of health, wealth and sanity. Let us say that they do - and that less conventional family units struggle to make ends meet.

Statistics showing that the children of nuclear families more often prosper than do those of single parents are, surely, an argument that where money is available to be spent, it should be spent on supporting the latter rather than the former. More to the point, does Cameron seriously believe that couples who do not love one another will get married or stay married in order to secure whatever modest tax breaks are on offer for the nuclear family?

Or that, if they did, the lives of either parents or children in such a marriage would be happy ones? I cannot think that he does.

And if he does not, then the "support for marriage" he touts is not even an instance of misbegotten paternalism. It is something more intellectually incoherent, and more shabby: it is a straightforward sweetener to a section of society that's already doing fine, in order to garner the support of the press that serves its interests. Shame on him.

Ange in at the deep end

Angelina Jolie's directorial debut In The Land of Blood and Honey - a film about the relationship between a Bosnian Muslim woman and a Serbian army officer - hasn't exactly been calculated to avoid controversy. Outraged that "it depicts only Serbs as rapists" in the conflict, Branislav Djukic of the Bosnian Serb Association of Camp Prisoners announces: "We'll do our best to ban the film."

Djukic - a former POW - may have good reason to think wrong was done on both sides. But I can't help feeling that his stance of "ban this work of fiction" and "they had rapists too" could do with a bit of tweaking, PR-wise.

You can't say The Krankies were boring...

Living fossil variety veterans The Krankies - aka Wee Jimmy Krankie and his dad; aka married couple Janette and Ian Tough - have given a candid interview to Scottish Radio. The couple - catchphrase "Fan-dabi-dozy!" - speak about punching Paul Daniels off a bar stool, having alfresco sex on golf courses, borrowing Status Quo's tour bus and returning it in a condition that caused the notably badly behaved rockers to exclaim "blinkin' heck!", and enjoying a "swinging lifestyle" with multiple sexual partners entering the marriage as casual lovers.

It's always nice to hear something surprising about a celebrity's sex-life but I don't think that I will ever afterwards be able to go and see the Krankies in panto. "He's behind you!" Oh God. My eyes. My eyes.

Mugger's brush with royalty

There are few experiences in the ordinary run of things more alarming and upsetting than being on the phone to someone when they are assaulted or mugged. I remember with a shudder hearing the scuffle and cries of alarm when a random drunk tried to snog my girlfriend while she was walking home, late at night, on the phone to me.

With costly mobile phones often being snatched from the hands of the unwary it's not, alas, all that uncommon. But now it's happened to Prince Harry - who was talking to his friend Thomas van Straubenzee at the exact moment the latter was mugged.

Fortunately, royal princes come with armed close protection officers, and Harry zoomed to the scene to assist. Imagine being the mugger, though: grabbing the phone and hearing a half-familiar voice coming through it. You're who? He may be lying low for a day or two.